OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Constructing High Precision Knowledge Bases with Subjective and Factual Attributes
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Knowledge bases (KBs) are the backbone of many ubiquitous applications and are thus required to exhibit high precision. However, for KBs that store subjective attributes of entities, e.g., whether a movie is "kid friendly", simply estimating precision is complicated by the inherent ambiguity in measuring subjective phenomena. In this work, we develop a method for constructing KBs with tunable precision--i.e., KBs that can be made to operate at a specific false positive rate, despite storing both difficult-to-evaluate subjective attributes and more traditional factual attributes. The key to our approach is probabilistically modeling user consensus with respect to each entity-attribute pair, rather than modeling each pair as either True or False. Uncertainty in the model is explicitly represented and used to control the KB's precision. We propose three neural networks for fitting the consensus model and evaluate each one on data from Google Maps--a large KB of locations and their subjective and factual attributes. The results demonstrate that our learned models are well-calibrated and thus can successfully be used to control the KB's precision. Moreover, when constrained to maintain 95% precision, the best consensus model matches the F-score of a baseline that models each entity-attribute pair as a binary variable and does not support tunable precision. When unconstrained, our model dominates the same baseline by 12% F-score. Finally, we perform an empirical analysis of attribute-attribute correlations and show that leveraging them effectively contributes to reduced uncertainty and better performance in attribute prediction.
Deep ensemble learning for Alzheimers disease classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Ensemble learning use multiple algorithms to obtain better predictive performance than any single one of its constituent algorithms could. With growing popularity of deep learning, researchers have started to ensemble them for various purposes. Few if any, however, has used the deep learning approach as a means to ensemble algorithms. This paper presents a deep ensemble learning framework which aims to harness deep learning algorithms to integrate multisource data and tap the wisdom of experts. At the voting layer, a sparse autoencoder is trained for feature learning to reduce the correlation of attributes and diversify the base classifiers ultimately. At the stacking layer, a nonlinear feature-weighted method based on deep belief networks is proposed to rank the base classifiers which may violate the conditional independence. Neural network is used as meta classifier. At the optimizing layer, under-sampling and threshold-moving are used to cope with cost-sensitive problem. Optimized predictions are obtained based on ensemble of probabilistic predictions by similarity calculation. The proposed deep ensemble learning framework is used for Alzheimers disease classification. Experiments with the clinical dataset from national Alzheimers coordinating center demonstrate that the classification accuracy of our proposed framework is 4% better than 6 well-known ensemble approaches as well as the standard stacking algorithm. Adequate coverage of more accurate diagnostic services can be provided by utilizing the wisdom of averaged physicians. This paper points out a new way to boost the primary care of Alzheimers disease from the view of machine learning.
Attention: A Big Surprise for Cross-Domain Person Re-Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we focus on model generalization and adaptation for cross-domain person re-identification (Re-ID). Unlike existing cross-domain Re-ID methods, leveraging the auxiliary information of those unlabeled target-domain data, we aim at enhancing the model generalization and adaptation by discriminative feature learning, and directly exploiting a pre-trained model to new domains (datasets) without any utilization of the information from target domains. To address the discriminative feature learning problem, we surprisingly find that simply introducing the attention mechanism to adaptively extract the person features for every domain is of great effectiveness. We adopt two popular type of attention mechanisms, long-range dependency based attention and direct generation based attention. Both of them can perform the attention via spatial or channel dimensions alone, even the combination of spatial and channel dimensions. The outline of different attentions are well illustrated. Moreover, we also incorporate the attention results into the final output of model through skip-connection to improve the features with both high and middle level semantic visual information. In the manner of directly exploiting a pre-trained model to new domains, the attention incorporation method truly could enhance the model generalization and adaptation to perform the cross-domain person Re-ID. We conduct extensive experiments between three large datasets, Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID and MSMT17. Surprisingly, introducing only attention can achieve state-of-the-art performance, even much better than those cross-domain Re-ID methods utilizing auxiliary information from the target domain.
XDoser, A Benchmarking Tool for System Load Measurement Using Denial of Service Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Technology has developed so fast that we feel both safe as well as unsafe in both ways. Systems used today are always prone to attack by malicious users. In most cases, services are hindered because these systems cannot handle the amount of over loads the attacker provides. So, proper service load measurement is necessary. The tool that is being described in this paper for developments is based on the Denial of Service methodologies. This tool, XDoser will put a synthetic load on the servers for testing purpose. The HTTP Flood method is used which includes an HTTP POST method as it forces the website to gather the maximum resources possible in response to every single request. The tool developed in this paper will focus on overloading the backend with multiple requests. So, the tool can be implemented for servers new or old for synthetic test endurance testing.
Particle Filter Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been extraordinarily successful for prediction with sequential data. To tackle highly variable and noisy real-world data, we introduce Particle Filter Recurrent Neural Networks (PF-RNNs), a new RNN family that explicitly models uncertainty in its internal structure: while an RNN relies on a long, deterministic latent state vector, a PF-RNN maintains a latent state distribution, approximated as a set of particles. For effective learning, we provide a fully differentiable particle filter algorithm that updates the PF-RNN latent state distribution according to the Bayes rule. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed PF-RNNs outperform the corresponding standard gated RNNs on a synthetic robot localization dataset and 10 real-world sequence prediction datasets for text classification, stock price prediction, etc.
Does computer vision matter for action?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Computer vision produces representations of scene content. Much computer vision research is predicated on the assumption that these intermediate representations are useful for action. Recent work at the intersection of machine learning and robotics calls this assumption into question by training sensorimotor systems directly for the task at hand, from pixels to actions, with no explicit intermediate representations. Thus the central question of our work: Does computer vision matter for action? We probe this question and its offshoots via immersive simulation, which allows us to conduct controlled reproducible experiments at scale. We instrument immersive three-dimensional environments to simulate challenges such as urban driving, off-road trail traversal, and battle. Our main finding is that computer vision does matter. Models equipped with intermediate representations train faster, achieve higher task performance, and generalize better to previously unseen environments. A video that summarizes the work and illustrates the results can be found at https://youtu.be/4MfWa2yZ0Jc
Learning Semantics-aware Distance Map with Semantics Layering Network for Amodal Instance Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this work, we demonstrate yet another approach to tackle the amodal segmentation problem. Specifically, we first introduce a new representation, namely a semantics-aware distance map (sem-dist map), to serve as our target for amodal segmentation instead of the commonly used masks and heatmaps. The sem-dist map is a kind of level-set representation, of which the different regions of an object are placed into different levels on the map according to their visibility. It is a natural extension of masks and heatmaps, where modal, amodal segmentation, as well as depth order information, are all well-described. Then we also introduce a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, which we refer to as semantic layering network, to estimate sem-dist maps layer by layer, from the global-level to the instance-level, for all objects in an image. Extensive experiments on the COCOA and D2SA datasets have demonstrated that our framework can predict amodal segmentation, occlusion and depth order with state-of-the-art performance.
DOMtegrity: Ensuring Web Page Integrity against Malicious Browser Extensions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we address an unsolved problem in the real world: how to ensure the integrity of the web content in a browser in the presence of malicious browser extensions? The problem of exposing confidential user credentials to malicious extensions has been widely understood, which has prompted major banks to deploy two-factor authentication. However, the importance of the `integrity' of the web content has received little attention. We implement two attacks on real-world online banking websites and show that ignoring the `integrity' of the web content can fundamentally defeat two-factor solutions. To address this problem, we propose a cryptographic protocol called DOMtegrity to ensure the end-to-end integrity of the DOM structure of a web page from delivering at a web server to the rendering of the page in the user's browser. DOMtegrity is the first solution that protects DOM integrity without modifying the browser architecture or requiring extra hardware. It works by exploiting subtle yet important differences between browser extensions and in-line JavaScript code. We show how DOMtegrity prevents the earlier attacks and a whole range of man-in-the-browser (MITB) attacks. We conduct extensive experiments on more than 14,000 real-world extensions to evaluate the effectiveness of DOMtegrity.
Inducing the Lyndon Array
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we propose a variant of the induced suffix sorting algorithm by Nong (TOIS, 2013) that computes simultaneously the Lyndon array and the suffix array of a text in $O(n)$ time using $σ+ O(1)$ words of working space, where $n$ is the length of the text and $σ$ is the alphabet size. Our result improves the previous best space requirement for linear time computation of the Lyndon array. In fact, all the known linear algorithms for Lyndon array computation use suffix sorting as a preprocessing step and use $O(n)$ words of working space in addition to the Lyndon array and suffix array. Experimental results with real and synthetic datasets show that our algorithm is not only space-efficient but also fast in practice.
3D Reconstruction of Whole Stomach from Endoscope Video Using Structure-from-Motion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Gastric endoscopy is a common clinical practice that enables medical doctors to diagnose the stomach inside a body. In order to identify a gastric lesion's location such as early gastric cancer within the stomach, this work addressed to reconstruct the 3D shape of a whole stomach with color texture information generated from a standard monocular endoscope video. Previous works have tried to reconstruct the 3D structures of various organs from endoscope images. However, they are mainly focused on a partial surface. In this work, we investigated how to enable structure-from-motion (SfM) to reconstruct the whole shape of a stomach from a standard endoscope video. We specifically investigated the combined effect of chromo-endoscopy and color channel selection on SfM. Our study found that 3D reconstruction of the whole stomach can be achieved by using red channel images captured under chromo-endoscopy by spreading indigo carmine (IC) dye on the stomach surface.
Data Complexity and Rewritability of Ontology-Mediated Queries in Metric Temporal Logic under the Event-Based Semantics (Full Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

We investigate the data complexity of answering queries mediated by metric temporal logic ontologies under the event-based semantics assuming that data instances are finite timed words timestamped with binary fractions. We identify classes of ontology-mediated queries answering which can be done in AC0, NC1, L, NL, P, and coNP for data complexity, provide their rewritings to first-order logic and its extensions with primitive recursion, transitive closure or datalog, and establish lower complexity bounds.
The Security Implications of Data Subject Rights
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

Data protection regulations give individuals rights to obtain the information that entities have on them. However, providing such information can also reveal aspects of the underlying technical infrastructure and organisational processes. This article explores the security implications this raises, and highlights the need to consider such in rights fulfillment processes. To appear in IEEE Security & Privacy
Memory-efficient and fast implementation of local adaptive binarization methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Binarization is widely used as an image preprocessing step to separate object especially text from background before recognition. For noisy images with uneven illumination such as degraded documents, threshold values need to be computed pixel by pixel to obtain a good segmentation. Since local threshold values typically depend on moment-based statistics such as mean and variance of gray levels inside rectangular windows, integral images which are memory consuming are commonly used to accelerate the calculation. Observed that moment-based statistics as well as quantiles in a sliding window can be computed recursively, integral images can be avoided without neglecting speed, more binarization methods can be accelerated too. In particular, given a $H\times W$ input image, Sauvola's method and alike can run in $Θ(HW)$ time independent of window size, while only around $6\min\{H,W\}$ bytes of auxiliary space is needed, which is significantly lower than the $16HW$ bytes occupied by the two integral images. Since the proposed technique enable various well-known local adaptive binarization methods to be applied in real-time use cases on devices with limited resources, it has the potential of wide application.
Shared control schematic for brain controlled vehicle based on fuzzy logic
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

Brain controlled vehicle refers to the vehicle that obtains control commands by analyzing the driver's EEG through Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). The research of brain controlled vehicles can not only promote the integration of brain machines, but also expand the range of activities and living ability of the disabled or some people with limited physical activity, so the research of brain controlled vehicles is of great significance and has broad application prospects. At present, BCI has some problems such as limited recognition accuracy, long recognition time and limited number of recognition commands in the process of analyzing EEG signals to obtain control commands. If only use the driver's EEG signals to control the vehicle, the control performance is not ideal. Based on the concept of Shared control, this paper uses the fuzzy control (FC) to design an auxiliary controller to realize the cooperative control of automatic control and brain control. Designing a Shared controller which evaluates the current vehicle status and decides the switching mechanism between automatic control and brain control to improve the system control performance. Finally, based on the joint simulation platform of Carsim and MATLAB, with the simulated brain control signals, the designed experiment verifies that the control performance of the brain control vehicle can be improved by adding the auxiliary controller.
A Novel Time-Based Modulation Scheme in Time-Asynchronous Channels for Molecular Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, a novel time-based modulation scheme is proposed in the time-asynchronous channel for diffusion-based molecular communication systems with drift. Based on this modulation scheme, we demonstrate that the sample variance of information molecules' arrival time approximately follows a noncentral chi-squared distribution. According to its conditional probability density function (PDF), the asynchronous receiver designs are deduced based on the maximum likelihood (ML) detection, with or without background noise in the channel environment. Since the proposed schemes can be applied to the case of transmitting multiple information molecules, simulation results reveal that the bit error ratio (BER) performance improves with the increase of the number of released information molecules. Furthermore, when the background noise is not negligible, our proposed asynchronous scheme outperforms the asynchronous modulation techniques based on encoding information on the time between two consecutive release of information molecules.
Prostate Cancer Detection using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Prostate cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer and the third leading cause of cancer death in North America. As an integrated part of computer-aided detection (CAD) tools, diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI) has been intensively studied for accurate detection of prostate cancer. With deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) significant success in computer vision tasks such as object detection and segmentation, different CNNs architectures are increasingly investigated in medical imaging research community as promising solutions for designing more accurate CAD tools for cancer detection. In this work, we developed and implemented an automated CNNs-based pipeline for detection of clinically significant prostate cancer (PCa) for a given axial DWI image and for each patient. DWI images of 427 patients were used as the dataset, which contained 175 patients with PCa and 252 healthy patients. To measure the performance of the proposed pipeline, a test set of 108 (out of 427) patients were set aside and not used in the training phase. The proposed pipeline achieved area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.87 (95% Confidence Interval (CI): 0.84-0.90) and 0.84 (95% CI: 0.76-0.91) at slice level and patient level, respectively.
Sitara: Spectrum Measurement Goes Mobile Through Crowd-sourcing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Software-defined radios (SDRs) are often used in the experimental evaluation of next-generation wireless technologies. While crowd-sourced spectrum monitoring is an important component of future spectrum-agile technologies, there is no clear way to test it in the real world, i.e., with hundreds of users each with an SDR in their pocket participating in RF experiments controlled by, and data uploaded to, the cloud. Current fully functional SDRs are bulky, with components connected via wires, and last at most hours on a single battery charge. To address the needs of such experiments, we design and develop a compact, portable, untethered, and inexpensive SDR we call Sitara. Our SDR interfaces with a mobile device over Bluetooth 5 and can function standalone or as a client to a central command and control server. The Sitara offers true portability: it operates up to one week on battery power, requires no external wired connections and occupies a footprint smaller than a credit card. It transmits and receives common waveforms, uploads IQ samples or processed receiver data through a mobile device to a server for remote processing and performs spectrum sensing functions. Multiple Sitaras form a distributed system capable of conducting experiments in wireless networking and communication in addition to RF monitoring and sensing activities. In this paper, we describe our design, evaluate our solution, present experimental results from multi-sensor deployments and discuss the value of this system in future experimentation.
A survey of advances in vision-based vehicle re-identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Vehicle re-identification (V-reID) has become significantly popular in the community due to its applications and research significance. In particular, the V-reID is an important problem that still faces numerous open challenges. This paper reviews different V-reID methods including sensor based methods, hybrid methods, and vision based methods which are further categorized into hand-crafted feature based methods and deep feature based methods. The vision based methods make the V-reID problem particularly interesting, and our review systematically addresses and evaluates these methods for the first time. We conduct experiments on four comprehensive benchmark datasets and compare the performances of recent hand-crafted feature based methods and deep feature based methods. We present the detail analysis of these methods in terms of mean average precision (mAP) and cumulative matching curve (CMC). These analyses provide objective insight into the strengths and weaknesses of these methods. We also provide the details of different V-reID datasets and critically discuss the challenges and future trends of V-reID methods.
A Survey on Biomedical Image Captioning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Image captioning applied to biomedical images can assist and accelerate the diagnosis process followed by clinicians. This article is the first survey of biomedical image captioning, discussing datasets, evaluation measures, and state of the art methods. Additionally, we suggest two baselines, a weak and a stronger one; the latter outperforms all current state of the art systems on one of the datasets.
Implicit Background Estimation for Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Scene understanding and semantic segmentation are at the core of many computer vision tasks, many of which, involve interacting with humans in potentially dangerous ways. It is therefore paramount that techniques for principled design of robust models be developed. In this paper, we provide analytic and empirical evidence that correcting potentially errant non-distinct mappings that result from the softmax function can result in improving robustness characteristics on a state-of-the-art semantic segmentation model with minimal impact to performance and minimal changes to the code base.